Divine Illumination

The History and Future of Augustine's Theory of Knowledge

Lydia Schumacher

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444395082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

DIVINE ILLUMINATION

"An important and ground-breaking study which links growing interest in Augustine and medieval philosophy with cutting-edge questions in contemporary philosophy of religion, particularly concerning epistemology and the 'rationality' of religion."

Janet Soskice, University of Cambridge

"In this lucidly argued and solidly documented study, Schumacher uncovers the roots of problems notoriously besetting modern theories of knowledge in conflicting medieval interpretations of Augustine's assumptions about knowledge as divine illumination: an intriguing thesis, which she handles with delicacy and flair."

Fergus Kerr, O.P. University of Edinburgh

"Challenges the traditional history of theories of knowledge. A bold and provocative reading."

Olivier Boulnois, École Pratique des Hautes Études (University of Paris, Sorbonne)

Divine Illumination offers an original interpretation of Augustine's theory of knowledge, tracing its development in the work of medieval thinkers such as Anselm, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. Although Scotus is often deemed responsible for finally pronouncing Augustine's longstanding illumination account untenable, Schumacher shows that he only rejected a version that was the byproduct of a shift in the understanding of illumination and knowledge more generally within the thirteenth-century Franciscan school of thought.

To reckon with the challenges in contemporary thought on knowledge that were partly made possible by this shift, Schumacher recommends relearning a way of thinking about knowledge that was familiar to Augustine and those who worked in continuity with him.

Her book thus anticipates a new approach to dealing with debates in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of religion, and theology, even while correcting some longstanding assumptions about Augustine and his most significant medieval readers.

1

Augustine (AD 354–430)

Introduction

When scholars turn to interpret Augustine’s account of knowledge by illumination, they usually look first at works such as Soliloquia, and above all De magistro, which he composed shortly after his conversion in 386, for these contain some of the most well-known and extended passages dealing explicitly with illumination. Those who consult later works normally only do so to obtain additional references to the divine light rather than theological context. If neglecting to consider Augustinian illumination within its proper theological framework complicates the effort to interpret its function, as I have already suggested, then one may wonder why the scholarly habit of taking Augustine’s illumination arguments at face value has not been challenged in the past.

So far as I can tell, there are at least two main reasons why divine illumination has not yet been the subject of a theological interpretation. The first is that the treatise where Augustine offers the theological context most pertinent to the interpretation of illumination, namely De Trinitate, has been criticized on the basis of misapprehensions for quite some time. For the most part, the account of the relevant sections of De Trinitate I offer in this chapter presupposes the unity and coherence of the work, which scholars in the fairly recent past have called into question, along with the doctrine of the Trinity that is developed in the first half of the book and the seven psychological analogies to the Trinity that are delineated in the second.¹

The reason my engagement in the controversies surrounding De Trinitate is limited is that I assume knowledge of the comprehensive work other scholars have done to settle those controversies. While Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres, and Michel René Barnes have addressed the problems associated with Augustine’s Trinitarian theology and theological anthropology, both these and others have met the charges against the psychological analogies by showing that the treatise is a progressive line of inquiry designed to reform the reader into the image of God.²

Assuming that it is such an inquiry, I elaborate on the ways in which the treatise is designed to carry the reader through the process of conforming to the image of God, in an effort to interpret the doctrine of illumination that serves to illustrate that process. Apart from the groundbreaking efforts of other scholars who have worked on Augustine’s theology, this effort to read his account of illumination in its theological context would not be possible. The fact that these efforts have been put forward only fairly recently may be one reason why a reading of illumination that is attentive to the theological context of De Trinitate has not been given in the past.

In her recent book, Carol Harrison discusses a second aspect of the situation in Augustinian studies that has undoubtedly encouraged the scholarly tendency to read Augustine’s writings on illumination, especially the early ones, without reference to the theological context he later elucidates in works like De Trinitate. For over a century, she explains, scholars have operated on the assumption that Augustine underwent an intellectual revolution just before he became Bishop of Hippo in 396. In writings, including the Confessiones, dating from this time, Augustine began to work out his mature theological perspective. Because the doctrines he codified during this period are supposedly unidentifiable in the more “philosophical” writings that date to the decade after his conversion in 386, scholars virtually universally see 396 rather than 386 as the real turning-point in his thought.³

As Harrison points out, Peter Brown, in his immensely influential biography of Augustine, perpetuated this notion that there are “two Augustines”: the Augustine of the early works, a young devotee of Christian philosophy, and the Augustine of 396 and onwards, a mature and devout clergyman.⁴ Following the publication of Brown’s book in 1967, Harrison observes that the “two Augustines” theory became established in the scholarship. As a result, the author of the early works came to be considered as “no more and no less than a philosopher.”⁵

Because Augustine supposedly remained under the spell of Neo-Platonism during the first decade of his Christian life, his early writings are said to be “of doubtful significance for appreciating his mature thought.”⁶ According to Harrison, the “two Augustines” thesis is simply a revised version of the old and long since dispatched idea that Augustine converted to Neo-Platonism rather than Christianity in 386.⁷ However, she thinks the “two Augustines” theory undermines “the nature and importance of his conversion in 386 in a manner just as radical as those who held that Augustine was initially converted to Neo-Platonism.”⁸

As Harrison indicates, Brown admits in the 2000 edition of his biography that the “two Augustines” thesis was more of a theoretical experiment than a statement of fact.⁹ By this time, however, his thesis had already earned universal acclaim.¹⁰ In the effort to counteract the scholarly effects of the wide acceptance of that thesis, Harrison contends that the real revolution in Augustine’s thought happened in 386. Just prior to that time, Platonism had freed him from a false Manichean concept of God as “an infinitely diffused material substance,”¹¹ and had instilled in him a sense of God’s transcendence and of the reliance of all reality on Him. By reading the books of the Platonists, Augustine was prepared to realize at his conversion that faith in the Triune Incarnate God fulfills the Platonic vision. When he went on to construct his theology, he did so on a foundation laid in the Garden of Milan.

Harrison contends that Augustine’s mature understanding of sin, grace, free will, and so on, is inchoately present in his early works. In this way, she advances an argument for the continuity between the early and late theological thought of St. Augustine. The argument of this chapter, not unlike Harrison’s, turns on the assumption that there is continuity in Augustine’s thought.¹² While her goal was to “find” Augustine’s later theological thought in his early writings, mine is to show that the early works in which Augustine first and perhaps most forcibly articulates his theory of knowledge by illumination can and should be read in the theological context of the later works, which shed light on the logic of the account.

Around the time of his conversion, it would seem that Augustine came to see that faith in Christ enacts the Platonic theory of knowledge by illumination, the contours of which had become clear to him through the prior reading of Platonist works. Although he had yet to explain for the sake of his readers how exactly the Christian doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation enact the account, Augustine gestures in the early works toward the distinctly Christian conception of illumination he already has in mind.

If Augustine’s initial references to divine illumination have not yet been retrospectively read in their theological context, this must be to some extent attributable to the wide acceptance of the “two Augustines” theory – the tenability of which Harrison has now decisively challenged – which has prompted scholars in the past to regard works from the two “phases” of Augustine’s career in separation. The groundbreaking work she and others have recently accomplished is the foundation on which I will proceed to present a theologically contextualized rendering of Augustine’s illumination theory, which starts with the account of the Trinitarian doctrine he delineates in the first half of De Trinitate.

The Doctrine of God

One point Augustine makes abundantly clear in De Trinitate is that the nature of God is not like the nature of any thing that human beings know.¹³ By contrast to material beings that come into existence at a point in time and gradually become the finite creatures they were made to be – development that is made possible by the cooperation of their component parts – God is an immaterial Being that never changes. He is not constituted by parts but is one thing, which is all that is Good, all the time: infinite and eternal.¹⁴ To sum up: He is simple, and it is His simplicity that renders Him unknowable to those beings that occupy the realm of diverse things He has made.

In the first half of his treatise on the Trinity, Augustine acknowledges that some find the notion of divine simplicity difficult to reconcile with the Catholic teaching that God is Triune. In response to those who suppose that the plurality of Persons threatens the unity of the divine being and divine action, Augustine argues that the participation of the three Persons is precisely what makes it possible to affirm that there is one God who always does one thing, which is to know and make known His own glory.¹⁵

In elaborating this claim, Augustine distinguishes between the substance of God and the relations in God. Whatever can be said of the sub­stance of God, such as that He is Good or that He acts for His own glory, the bishop writes, can be affirmed of all three Persons.¹⁶ Whatever can be said specifically of one Person – such as that the Father is the unbegotten beginning who generates the Son; that the Son proceeds from the Father;¹⁷ or that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son and therefore proceeds from both, binding them together¹⁸– is said relatively of the Person in question.¹⁹

Far from undermining the singularity of the divine substance and divine action, Augustine contends that the three Persons enact it as they subsist in their different relations. When the Father communicates Himself or His glory to the Son, the Son expresses what He receives, which is nothing but the Spirit of God that gestures back toward the divine glory the Father first made manifest. Because the Father works through the Son in the Spirit, such that the three work inseparably, it is possible to affirm that there is one God whose nature is to know and make known His own glory.²⁰ Because “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit constitute a divine unity of one and the same substance in an indivisible equality,” in summary, “they are not three gods but one God.”²¹

Creation in the Image of God

The Natural Order

Augustine’s most elaborate account of God’s creation is found in the twelve books of his De Genesi ad litteram. In that treatise, the bishop begins his discussion of God’s creative work with an explanation of the role that each Person of the Trinity played in creation. This explanation comes by way of the exegesis of Genesis 1:3: “then God said, ‘let there be light’!”²² According to Augustine, all three Persons were involved in this initial proclamation of light, inasmuch as t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title page
• Challenges in Contemporary Theology
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Editions
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Augustine (AD 354–430)
• 2 Anselm (AD 1033–1109)
• 3 Divine Illumination in Transition (AD 1109–1257)
• 4 Bonaventure (AD 1221–74)
• 5 Aquinas (AD 1225–74)
• 6 Divine Illumination in Decline (AD 1274–c.1300)
• 7 The Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Index